Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

How has the first half of your year been? What have you accomplished?
The first half of 2019 hasn't gone all that great. In fact, it's been depressing and difficult. We moved into this apartment in December 2018, and immediately encountered mice. We caught 41 mice in the first four months we lived here. After we finally managed to stop the hole up the mice were using, we had bedbug. In order to get rid of the bedbug we had to call Code Enforcement. I think we finally got rid of the bedbug, at least I hope we did.

For the first five months of 2019, we overdrafted the checking account. it hasn't overdrafted yet this month, but there is still five days left in June. I had to take out two loans at a Pay Day loan place, which I'm going to be paying off the rest of 2019 and in to 2020.

What have I accomplished? I've managed to write 24 poems of the 200 I'm writing for the celebration of the Bicentenary of the Birth of the Bab. There are 126 days to go and I have and I have 176 more poems to write. I hope I can do it, but this afternoon I'm not sure about anything except that I'm beginning to fall into a depression.

How has your last week been? How are you doing today? What are you working on right now?
My last week has been stressful interesting. I finished one poem of the 200 and started another, which I'm stuck on. I'm going to go ahead a push through, I can always rewrite the poems after the celebration if I feel they need rewriting. The problem I encounter in rewriting is that I end up writing a different poem with the same theme.

On Sunday, I got a call from my younger brother. The doctors found a growth in his stomach area, which they don't know if its cancer or not. He's at the the Colorado University hospital right now. On Wednesday they will go in and see if they can remove it or part of it. On Thursday they do a biopsy, and he goes home on Friday. They won't know anything about the biopsy until next week sometime. I suspect this is part of the reason I'm going into a depression.

Where is your year headed? What are you on track to achieve before 2020?
Where is my year headed. I have no idea. I'm just going to take it one-day-at-a-tine. I'll focus on finishing the poems to go in "Bicentenary Poems and Prose" .

What has been occupying your headspace lately? What are you thinking about?
My headspace isn't very positive right now. My self-talk is getting negative. I know that I don't have to let my self-talk get negative. Sometimes I get tired and want to give up, maybe I need to take a different approach. Maybe I need to find myself someplace else to live. Someplace that's cheaper. Maybe I just need to write it out. Writing this has helped.